31.08.2011

30.08.2011

This first difficulty is not thematically discussed here; yet, Nietzsche – and Heidegger, and Marx before him, and even Hegel – teach us that the growing awareness that we think only within the ambit of western culture is indeed part of such culture and its nihilism, since the very idea of a universal truth and a transcultural humanism (as for example in the doctrine of natural law or ultimate grounds) matured precisely within this given culture. What is at stake here is an issue of power that concerns the so-called metaphysical violence of philosophy, in its administration of truth. The jolly old reptile of war kisses our knuckles with bricks. We’re always nervous but we like that. If magmas cool beneath the surface they spit and wheeze. They hiss. “The serpentine figure in the image is a melted catheter.” Have you read “Cold Grey Dirigibles” by Ian Bogost? Sometimes … the dots that join the links to links elsewhere to here fall off & rot. The tented outdoor bar and tables, the sparkling glints of diamond light created by the reflections dancing off the tall thin-stemmed champagne glasses, the cool jazz drifting from within and the impressive row of black limousines lined up out front, the magnificent spectacle of liberal wealth displaying itself in the midst of the decline of empire, the heavy unsmiling bodyguards eyeing the proceedings from a discreet vantage, the quietly imposing entourages of Governor and Senator, the bustling of the young stylishly outfitted help, the air of celebrity and of fine stock profile and of the cultural satiation of the permanently indulged, the privileged yet never quite satisfied, lay thick upon the foggy pall of night air enveloping the Avenue of the Possessed and Dispossessed, street of extreme wealth and extreme poverty uncomfortably superimposed, the ambient pungent aroma of unimaginably savoury and expertly prepared delicacies immaculately and discreetly served, the poor kept well out of the way, loitering without intent or lying upon cardboard pallets in the doorways of closed shops, as my shadow passed in disconnected contemplation ... Thinking of the paranoia of Constantine, the intense authoritarian efforts of Domitian and Constantine to maintain cohesion, to retain power, all for naught in the end, the black tide could not be resisted, the collapse was compelled onward by its own momentum, the overlayering of social strata, the proliferation of specialized economic roles, the rise of the information producers and analysts, the decline of real production on the part of the accumulators of crucial resources, the fragmentation of what had once been a whole into multiple distinct and incompatible social units, the increasing strain on the population at large, the dismembered remains of the victims of ritual sacrifice stacked in the dreaming mounds left after the mysterious fall of the dominant city of the Mississippian culture, Cahokia, largest urban center north of the great Mesoamerican complexes of Mexico, a London or Paris of pre-Columbian times, with its cruel falcon gods, its fictive kinship rituals, its terminated bureaucracies and lost chiefdom lineages and intricate class structures buried under a millennial burden of dirt and forgetfulness, the digits of the inhabitants of the mass graves locked eternally in a clawing position as they struggle forever to climb upward through the impossible weight from above ...

[Note: Sources: Gianni Vattimo, “Nihilism as Emancipation” (tr. Lorenzo Chiesa), in The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (eds. Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano); Pier Aldo Rovatti, “Foucault Docet” (tr. Lorenzo Chiesa), in Chiesa and Toscano; John Olson, “Casus Belli”, “Red Guitars”, in Backscatter: new and selected poems; Harvey Bialy, “BioHaZart”, as seen in Tom Raworth, “BioHaZart”, at Tom Raworth, 27 Aug 011; JBR (“Steve Jobs is a fascist. That’s what everyone loves about him: he tells us what he wants, and he convinces us we are going to like it. And we do, not because he’s right (despite popular opinion), but because it’s so rare to get such definitive, brazen, top-down, abusive treatment ... It doesn’t matter if he’s right because his design sense is so definitive, it outstrips truth in favor of legend.--Ian Bogost, “Cold Grey Dirigibles: Brief thoughts on Steve Jobs’s Resignation”, at Ian Bogost, 27 Aug 011); Maurice Scully, “Song”, in Work; Tom Clark, “Cahokia”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 27 Aug 011 (Tom, forgive me for eating all your plums …)]

29.08.2011

Keystone XL = game over. Nihilation is not some fortuitous incident. As you will be aware, I move within a framework I ironically refer to as neo-classical. I mean I neo-classically refer to it as ironic. I think. There’s a leak, I told him, it’s right over my bed. So I went to a wedding reception, I told him, at the house of a man who painted with his ass. And the blind biwa player sits / Gives a polite bow / And / Be-ben-ben-ben / He sounds the strings of his biwa / His voice flows forth / Ben-ben-ben-be-ben-ben-ben / I was bored / I was sad I should feel that way / I, Shuntokumaru, cannot help feeling the itchiness of my skin. I am afraid I can be of little use to you. Like most hybrid texts, Boully’s offers more questions than answers. Who are the Lost Boys, really, and why are they clothed in bearsuits? What’s the history between Peter and Mrs. Darling? How many other little girls did Peter whisk off to Neverland? How does one properly dispose of Never poo? About Tinkerbell, Boully wonders: “where ever will we get such small medical supplies for you? The Tinker dental dam; the Tinker tampon.” I stole one of the cows and gave it to a Mongolian. All the yellow dies from red to green again. “The quotations in my works are like robbers lying in ambush on the highway to attack the passerby with weapons drawn and rob him of his conviction.” I find it interesting that Kafka, a German speaking Jew in a new Czech nation, dreamt up a small menagerie of talking and hybrid animals, from an ‘odradek’ to chatty jackals, to a celebrity ape who first learned to spit then, in a moment of triumph, blurted out “Hallo!” Dear Mothra, U jelly? I was shitting blood today because yesterday I ate one of those skyscrapers which are mostly all glass. And people don’t believe in karma. Now I'm almost sorry I made that eating lightbulbs comment to you. I flew over Portland while taking these hellacious dumps. I thought it was funny when the news reported it was raining blood … I thought it was funny when all these people appeared on TV looking like Carrie at the prom. It was really funny because the reporters kept backing up from them even while they held the microphones out for them to talk, and they kept advancing towards the reporters while dripping blood all over the street, squealing about heaven and hell. Their two favorite places. Besides WALMART. They were too full of glory to realize they smelled like shit. One of the reporters threw up live on air. Go directly to YouTube. Do not Pass Go. Go viral. You’re welcome. Every one of these shitty, bloody lunatics sounded and looked like Carrie’s mother after Carrie returns from the prom. … I’ve got your GTL, bro. Let me show you a different sort of crunch. Perhaps a good alternative perspective is found in how both Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze conceive of a-signification as a regime of signs beyond signification and meaning: Gary Genosko’s apt example (in: Félix Guattari. A Critical Introduction : London: Pluto 2009, 95-99) is the case of magnetic stripes on for instance your bank card as a form of automatized and operationalized local power that is not about interpretation, but a different set of signal work. Elaborating signaletic material – electronic signals and software – through a reference to Deleuze’s film theory and a-signification by Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen is also useful. As she elaborates – and this much we know from years of intensive reading of Deleuze in screen based analyses – Deleuze wanted to include much more than signification into the cinematic impact, and mapped a whole field of a-signifying matter in film: “sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal, and even verbal (oral and written).” (“The Haptic Interface. On Signal Transmissions and Events” in Interface Criticism. Aesthetics Beyond Buttons, edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold, Aarhus University Press 2011, 59). To quote Frances Raven: I hate finding out that a store I love is part of a chain. But burning down this town isn’t good for your lungs.

[Note: Sources: Firedoglake, “Game over”, email rec’d 26 Aug 011 approx 11:46 AM PST (Keystone XL is the pipeline that would feed oil from the Canada Tar Sands to big oil refineries in Texas); Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” (tr. David Farrell Krell), in Pathmarks (ed. William McNeill), as quoted in Matteo Mandari, “Beyond Nihilism: Notes Toward a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Philosophy in the 1930s”, in The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (ed. Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano); Mario Tronti, “Towards a Critique of Political Democracy” (tr. Alberto Toscano) in Chiesa and Toscano; JBR; Sean Lovelace, “30 Beginnings: Mary Miller”, at HTMLGIANT, 26 Aug 011; Hiromi Ito, “Earless”, in Killing Kanoko (tr. Jefrey Angles); Bill Berkson, “Lorelei”, in Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems; Kristin Sanders, “not merely because of the unknown that was”, at HTMLGIANT, 26 Aug 011; Kim Hyesoon, “Grief”, in Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (tr. Don Mee Choi); Guillaume Apollinaire, “The Windows” (tr. Donald Revell); JBR; Walter Benjamin, as quoted in Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content (tr. Georgia Albert) (”Benjamin, who for his entire life pursued the idea of writing a work made up entirely of quotations, had understood that the authority involved by the quotation is founded precisely on the destruction of the authority that is attributed to a certain text by its situation in the history of culture. (...) This particular way of entering into a relation with the past also constitutes the foundation of the activity of a figure with which Benjamin felt an instinctive affinity: that of the collector. The collector also "quotes" the object outside its context and in this way destroys the order inside which it finds its value and meaning.”) (the Apollinaire and the Agamben are as seen at wood s lot, 26 Aug 011); Linh Dinh, “Which Womb?”, in Some Kind of Cheese Orgy; William Keckler, “The Godzilla-Mothra Letters (continued)”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (the sequel), 26 Aug 011 (these letters are part of what looks to be a pretty funny book); Jussi Parikka, “Dirty matter”, at Machineology, 26 Aug 011; JBR; Frances Raven, “Aesthetic Business Driver Eating Out (42/7)”, “Exit 821: Blogger’s Paradise”, in Cooking with Organizational Structures]

SANTIAGO — Chilean President Sebastian Pinera pledged Sunday to get to the bottom of the killing of a teen during a mass protest as student leaders agreed to meet with the president on their grievances.

Manuel Gutierrez was shot to death Thursday during clashes between police and protesters in the town of Macul, east of Santiago, one of hundreds of places around the country where violence broke out during the general strike.

"The government is doing everything necessary to shed light on the circumstances and the responsibility for that death," Pinera said at a public event.

Pinera's conservative government has faced a wave of social protests, including massive marches by students demanding major educational reforms to make a free, quality university education available to all Chileans.

The unrest culminated in a 48-hour general strike Wednesday and Thursday called by the country's largest labor federation that quickly turned violent.

In addition to the death of the 16-year-old Gutierrez, hundreds of people were injured and 1,400 detained.

Pinera called for a "constructive dialogue aimed at finding solutions," and announced he was rescinding a seven percent health insurance tax on the pensions of poor senior citizens.

The Confederation of Students of Chile accepted Pinera's invitation to meet on Tuesday.

"We hope it is not just words and that the intention is to put something new on the table," said Grigorio Jackson, a student leader.

The student union has called a day of "national mourning" for Gutierrez on Monday.

Camila Vallejo, another student leader, vowed to confront the government "face to face" over the death.

"They have to take responsibility for this, one way or another, because it cannot go unpunished," she said.

Witnesses said the youth was pushing his brother in a wheelchair on a crosswalk when he was hit in the chest by a bullet.

His family blamed the police, but they denied it and turned over the weapons carried by the local police to investigators.

The publicly funded National Human Rights Institute demanded an internal investigation by the Carabineros, Chile's national police force, warning that public confidence in the police and the government was at stake.

This is automatic fire. This is automatic fire, look down the bridge of your nose at your brain, stuffing the carburetor ‘with a likeness burst in memory preserved in by-products of insect death.’ I say step off, Rosedust, Parkview Hospital just dumped Tommy’s dad, Loma Linda said care for you? you gotta be kidding, you’re uninsured, and County has 20 people in the ER, no beds for any of ‘em. Step off. Don’t dun me for a match, ‘cause you can launch one from your fingertips. A house fire / and a rose fire / are [are not] so different. People hold hands … this one in front, the other by the feet, the other by and by, a tower of people toward the sky. Stretching toward the sky. Trying to catch the flying fish. You can’t get life up there; you can only get the regular stations. Whereas hoodoo allopathic wayward gracias. I mean, are you destined or “destinated”? “What do they call you boy?” flat St Louis voice time he gave a Hopi kid fifty bucks to throw his goat into the Grand Canyon. The perfect specimen. The cat will sit where the rattlers sun and twitch her tail across warm granite. At the window cook cooks melted slime with cheese and sexy winds. In fact, the day I turned in the mss. Megan Fox announced she was removing her Marilyn Monroe tattoo because Marilyn Monroe “was bipolar and had personality disorders” and I felt at the time that was PERFECT to what I was writing towards in the end, and so I had to somehow plug that in. So if assemblages are not to be mere aggregates they have to have powers that partly depend on the properties and powers of their components but which contribute something over and above those powers: i.e. flat ontology needs emergence. This is why it’s better to use a red pen when doing “the math.”

27.08.2011

Angels are disembodied, pure intelligences (thus unable to enjoy aesthetic experiences). No muscle relaxants for them, no Greg Lynn’s Blobwall Pavilion. Still, the map is wet, but usable. In the vast water, the stars see themselves. Your bones the warmest bones in the woodpile. See that ten-year-old? She should place her hand on the roof of a schoolbus, & drive it across a city of sand. Armed with a size 0 brush, and still shaking, Opalka painted in white a little “1” on the upper left-hand corner of a gray canvas. He then made his way horizontally across the canvas, number by number—2…3…4…5 — until he had a row of numbers, then two rows of numbers, then three. When Opalka ran out of room, when the last number was painted in the bottom right-hand corner, he stopped. Later, the artist made another painting, and another, each one picking up numerically where the last painting left off. Pain, that’s a blood type. Stones in the gumball machine. “But to say that Troy has just been taken– we do not say that, because it is too far from the ‘now.’” “In France they’re like really cultural.” Another mass fainting incident struck a garment factory yesterday. The hydrangeas split, elegantly actuality in a void (plateau) of the crescendo. You who we see who is spoken to / … and bites all of the legs in the spider holes / and bites the long tucked tail of smoke. I just personally think it's important to encourage a little community, by planting some flowers and letting some wild plants grow. According to the poet, A.C., I am my garden's “animal.” Cup your ears, and cell-division will grow audible. There was cold muzak in the garage. The earthquake didn’t cause widespread damages or injuries, but it did put a crack in the Washington Monument. Making the future the oldest place of all.

26.08.2011

I’m talking to the engineer not the oil rag. I have made enough money in my life to satisfy my wants and caprices. He writes an electric swan, he is fucked by “teenage jesus”. It is fifty years from now, the year itself emitting strange groans. Some people enjoy telling their adventures more than experiencing them. Wired to adore I lay out. A-ok sores make up this space of “plague stages.” The idea is you can “visit where you live for the first time.” Direct passage away from aircraft. The big idea is that animals, humans included, use pollution to mark, claim and appropriate territory through defiling it, and that over time this appropriative act has evolved away from urine and feces, to “hard pollution,” industrial chemicals, and “soft pollution,” “tsunamis of writings, signs, images and logos flooding every kind of landscape with ads.” <We hold these fingers close to our noses because it’s embarrassing and disruptive> <We have it in common with the crazy woman, inserting our most internal smells into her own foreign language> Did you know these are the first 100% soy caskets ever made? Everyone can’t get a rib job. I mean there are people in the parking lot. Soldiers are just starting to listen to an uprooted tree. To build fifty million dollars. To hope the weeks are bending over. We as a people have to touch a huge reality. Correct; and purple for the chairs, Romania, Shrimp, Finland; catfish, worm cultures and cascading gray waves; words from the dictionaries, available but not seeing them yet, on the crests of waves, personae you know and those you don’t know yet, it is reasonable to conclude. And when I went to the mailbox to pick up the mail it was locked, historiated; and I flew away, like a red-backed sandpiper, but with a gray crown, fading stripes, riding some fewer waves, my one eye and a short think neck, lasting my fell years in a robed mist. Can we not and must we not distinguish, even when this appears impossible, between, on the one hand, the compulsion or autopositioning of sovereignty … and, on the other hand, this postulation of unconditionality, which can be found in the critical exigency as well as the (forgive the expression) deconstructive exigency of reason? In the name of reason? For deconstruction, if something of the sort exists, would remain above all, in my view, an unconditional rationalism that never renounces … the possibility of suspending in an argued, deliberated, rational fashion, all conditions, hypotheses, conventions, and presuppositions, and of criticizing unconditionally all conditionalities, including those that still found the critical idea, namely, those of the krinein, of the krisis, of the binary or dialectical decision or judgment. Kish-kish-chakish-chakish-chakish-kish-chakish chakish-chakish-chakish-chakish-kish chakish-chakish-chakish-chakish-chakish-chakish-kish-kish-chakish-kish / Chakish-chakish-chakish-chakish-chakish-kish-chakish-chakish-kish-chakish-chakish-chakish-chakish-chakish chakish-chakish-chakish-chakish-chakish-kish-kish-kish-kish / Plus I haven’t been to a wind’n’rainswept beach, listening to inhuman electronic sounds, since the time my cousin dragged me to Bundoran for ‘Krazy Nite Krazy’ at O’Gorman's nightclub.

25.08.2011

The U.S Border Inspection Station yawns, birds gather in shipping crates, sunset the color of day-old blood on gauze. First time I canned spicy beans, I nibbled the end off one and immediately called home and said goodbye and said, “Don't cry, Ma.” You’ll never see your precious Mongo again. These are perhaps tiresome inquiries. We have an agenda. We ask not only about the degradation of conditions of employment down the supply chain, in the informal sectors of the international labour market – even fascistic fashion journalists allow their moral fibre to bristle at the thought of those kinds of globalised immiseration – but I want to hear the plastic bag / in the tree / I want to look up / and see that it’s death (anamorphosis). Because I’m a fucking object-oriented / process philosophical communist. The faster we go, of course, the rounder we get. Shower off the oil. The passenger in front of us is playing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on his laptop. The repetition falters microtonally, banishing itself. g = l. Everything I note here is integrated. These databases center on content while something sober on the ground keeps looking up. I take you in to go beyond intoxication, to guard the masses. August begins to spin. There, I know it. I’m imprisoned to reach my market. Inspired by migratory birds and their ability to perceive the Earth’s magnetism, LEVEL 1 superimposes the participant’s field of vision with an additional signal consisting of directional color patterns. LEVEL 2 overlays synchronous retinal signals with asynchronous digital recordings, thus causing time to appear fluid and heterogeneous. Upon reaching LEVEL 3, all direct visual reception is shut off. Participants engage their surroundings relying entirely on the broadcast a network of hacked CCTV cameras activated by proximity. LEVEL 4 explores communication between the human and animal kingdoms, and Ernst Haeckel’s notion that language is the discriminating factor between them. A voice-changing device—the mouther—transforms human into animal utterance, preventing “normal” human interaction. LEVEL 5 provides theriomorphic features dependent on random sets of alternative geographies. LEVEL 6 mixes the consummatory cycles of gamers and bees. Optoelectronic devices paired with recognition technology mask billboards and signs with images of flowers, thus neutralizing their imposed top-down message. LEVEL 7 augments objects with electronic hairs, quills, scales, tails and feathers based on readings of atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed and temperature. I do not desire any beignets today, howsoever light, howsoever pecky with crumbs of white sugar. Not a diamond, either, but a femur pestle. Have you been eating deep-sea bioluminescent fish again? “One perception must immediately and directly lead to rhinestone Nietzsches, little wrecking balls in the dark.” The body of love and heat beneath the skin. Stars on the floor, “all the blood in the world in one space” [dolores dorantes]. And an inside-outside bird oracle.

24.08.2011

Poor New York, I think, poor Titanic but look at me, I’m flying over Colorado’s resistant minerals. O Rick Parry, your hair is so media-presidential; the rest of you is just a fart that turns and turns in my nostrils. Cuts of raw beef fill flatbeds hurling up the hill. I am starting to understand that there are other things called Velcro. What makes the masses into masses? It’s the #rd day then the %th day of one million degree heat. I walked into and slowly slowly swam lost thru a room filled with 9000 gold balloons. I listened to a middle-aged Albanian tell her son she no longer knew which way the wind blew. I saw her face, and your face, in Alan McCallum’s Surrogates. Paul Pfeiffer’s wasp video “Empire” would take a full three months to watch from beginning to end, and this tampers with everything I consider safe in the world. When I woke I was sixty, but I am eighty-nine years old right now, I have fleas, and the dogs are nowhere. I need yelps fit for a glass hand. Flowers made of smegma ruined my lawn. Here is your I.V. drip of sphinx’s blood. A crater appears beside the trees, in the dark. 241543903. He dislikes the easiness of the scream: the only scream is his cough.

[Notes: Sources: Farid Matuk, “Cairn”, “Long Before and Shortly After”, in Is It The King?; JBR (I read the thing about his hair in one of the Dallas newspapers; I don’t think it was a compliment); Susan Briante, “3rd Day of the Rainy Season”, “5th Day of the Rainy Season”, in Pioneers in the Study of Motion; JBR, immortalizing typos; JBR (re: Martin Creed, Work No. 1190: Half the air in a given space, at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas); JBR (re: Amri Sala, Intervista—Finding the Words, in the Silence and Time exhibit, Dallas Museum of Art); JBR (same show); Betsy Lewis, “Silence and Time at the Dallas Museum of Art”, at Glasstire, 11 Jun 011; JBR; Ryan Kilpatrick, “Community Heart Attack”, “All My Gods Arranged in Papier-Mache Rhythm”, “Gangrene”, at La Petite Zine; CA Conrad, blurb for Ryan Kilpatrick, Fuckscapes, at Blue Square Press; Susan Wheeler, “Bankruptcy & Exile”, as quoted in Michael Costello, “Susan Wheeler’s Poetic Alchemy and Chiaroscuro”, at We Who Are About To Die, 21 Aug 011; Robert Jackson, “your task for today …”, at Algorithm and Contingency, 21 Aug 011 (“TAKE A PHOTOGRAPH OF YOUR HEAD INSIDE A FREEZER. UPLOAD THIS PHOTO TO THE INTERNET (LIKE FLICKR). TAG THE FILE WITH: 241543903. THE IDEA IS THAT IF YOU SEARCH FOR THIS CRYPTIC TAG, ALL THE PHOTOS OF HEADS IN FREEZERS WILL APPEAR.” – “ABOUT 241543903”, at 241543903, approx 2009. Humans are just so fucking weird); Jalal Toufic, Distracted1]